[shuttertalk]

Great opportunity to revive this thread - according to Gizmodo, the death of Flickr is at hand, and the finger points squarely at their acquisition by Yahoo.

http://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-kil...e-internet

Some choice quotes:

It was a stunning failure in vision, and more or less the same thing happened at Flickr. All Yahoo cared about was the database its users had built and tagged. It didn't care about the community that had created it or (more importantly) continuing to grow that community by introducing new features.

Also (pardon the french):

Flickr offered a way to do that. Because Flickr photos were tagged and labeled and categorized so efficiently by users, they were highly searchable.

"That is the reason we bought Flickr—not the community. We didn't give a shit about that. The theory behind buying Flickr was not to increase social connections, it was to monetize the image index. It was totally not about social communities or social networking. It was certainly nothing to do with the users."

Finally:

Recently, Flickr rolled out a "Justified" view, a way to scan your friends' recent photos where they are all placed together like puzzle pieces. It's similar to the way Pinterest lays out images. It's a dramatic, gorgeous way to look at photos—that mostly highlights how rarely many people update now.

As I scroll down I note that friend after friend has quit posting. At the bottom of the page I am already back in mid 2010. So many of my friends have vanished. It feels like MySpace, circa 2009.

Any Flickr users here that can comment?